Chapter IV: Part 4

I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians: and if we are to get
Wordsworth recognised by the public and by the world, we must
recommend him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit of
disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a Wordsworthian myself. I
can read with pleasure and edification _Peter Bell_, and the whole
series of _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, and the addresses to Mr.
Wilkinson's spade, and even the _Thanksgiving Ode_; everything of
Wordsworth, I think, except _Vaudracour and Julia_. It is not for
nothing that one has been brought up in the veneration of a man so
truly worthy of homage; that one has seen and heard him, lived in his
neighbourhood, and been familiar with his country.

Alas! even the best of us are mortal; and we accept this graceful passage as Mr. Arnold's confession that he, too, is a Wordsworthian against whom we must be on our guard. An extremist of a school he could not now be; but "it is not for nothing," as he says, that he was trained in it. "Once a priest," says an Italian proverb, "always a priest"; and, we fear, once a Wordsworthian, always a Wordsworthian. It is no reproach; but "we must be on our guard." For our part, we are tolerably familiar with Wordsworth's country, but, beyond that, we are under no such spell as Mr. Arnold confesses to above. We entertain profound veneration and homage for Wordsworth, but it is the result, not so much of early teaching--the most difficult of all lessons to unlearn--as of independent admiration and sympathy inspired in riper years. We, too, can read _Peter Bell_ and the _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, but with more edification than pleasure; and we have read, afresh, every word of what Mr. Arnold has included in his _Poems of Wordsworth_, only to reach the conclusion we have already stated, that from many, only too many of them, the spirit, the essence, the indefinable something, of poetry is absent.

We should be sorry to be thought guilty of dogmatism, and there is always peril in generalisations. Let us therefore descend to particulars, as far as space will permit, and analyse the contents of Mr. Arnold's _Poems of Wordsworth_. The volume consists of 317 pages; of which 20 are dedicated to "Poems of Ballad Form," 92 to "Narrative Poems," 56 to "Lyrical Poems," 34 to "Poems akin to the Antique and Odes," 32 to "Sonnets," and 83 to "Reflective and Elegiac Poems."

In the first division, _We are Seven_, _Lucy Gray_, and _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, are the only poems that can be pronounced wholly satisfactory, and that give real pleasure. _Anecdote for Fathers_ and _Alice Fell_ would be just as well away, for they would raise the reputation of no poet, save it be with those against whom "we must be on our guard." The poems, _The Childless Father_, _Power of Music_, and _Star-Gazers_, are redeemed only by their moral; and perhaps of _Power of Music_, even this cannot be said.

An Orpheus! an Orpheus!--yes, Faith may grow bold,
And take to herself all the wonders of old;--
Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same
In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.

His station is there;--and he works on the crowd,
He sways them with harmony merry and loud;
He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim--
Was aught ever heard like his Fiddle and him?

What an eager assembly! what an empire is this!
The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss;
The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest;
And the guilt-burthened soul is no longer opprest.

Then follow eight stanzas, in which the baker, the apprentice, the newsman, the lamplighter, the porter, the lass with her barrow, the cripple, the mother, and others, are described as stopping to listen, in language similar to that of the three stanzas we have quoted; the only slight improvement upon it being such lines as "She sees the Musician, 'tis all that she sees," until we reach the conclusion:

Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;
Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue.

The more ardent admirers of Wordsworth are in the habit of assuming that those persons who approach their favourite poet with a more hesitating homage, fail to appreciate the beauty of simplicity, and fancy that a composition is not poetical because it lacks what is called elevation of language and the "grand style." We can assure them, in all sincerity, that far from that being the basis of our inability to admire all that they admire, we admire Wordsworth most, and we admire him immensely, when he is as simple as it is possible to be. We have just cited a poem, which we scarcely think deserves that name. But, side by side with it, in Mr. Arnold's volume, is a much shorter composition, on precisely the same theme, which is, if possible, still more simple in treatment, but which is true poetry, if true poetry was ever written. It is called _The Reverie of Poor Susan_:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.

She looks, and her heart is in heaven; but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.

After reading _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, we may pay Wordsworth's Muse the compliment that was paid by the Latin poet to the woman who was _simplex munditiis_. Its neat simplicity is in great measure the secret of its success; but it is not mean in its simplicity. Neither, as in the other poems we have contrasted with it, have we to wait till the end of the poem for the moral and the meaning. The moral is interwoven and interfused with it, and every line breathes the soul and essence of the entire composition. But nearly all these "Poems of Ballad Form" are didactic; and does not Mr. Arnold tell us, in his preface, "Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others; the ballad kind is a lower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is a lower kind"? Of the twenty pages of these poems of lower kind, we are strongly disposed to think that the "disinterested lover of poetry" would discard twelve, and retain only eight, and that Wordsworth, to use Mr. Arnold's phrase, would "stand higher" if this were done.

But even this proportion between retention and rejection cannot well be maintained by the disinterested lover of poetry as he advances through the volume. The "Narrative Poems" occupy nearly a third of it, and in this section the amount of real poetry is meagre indeed. We had no conception how many short poems Wordsworth had written, unredeemed by "the gleam, the light that never was, on sea or land," till we read this collection consecutively; and we read it in the open air, in a beautiful country, on the loveliest day of a lovely May. But nothing could possibly attune the heart of the disinterested lover of poetry to such verses as these:

When Ruth was left half desolate,
Her father took another mate;
And Ruth, not seven years old,
A slighted child, at her own will
Went wandering over dale and hill,
In thoughtless freedom, bold.

There came a Youth from Georgia's shore--
A military casque he wore,
With splendid feathers drest;
He brought them from the Cherokees;
The feathers nodded in the breeze,
And made a gallant crest.

"Beloved Ruth!" No more he said.
The wakeful Ruth at midnight shed
A solitary tear:
She thought again--and did agree
With him to sail across the sea,
And drive the flying deer.

"And now, as fitting is and right,
We in the Church our faith will plight,
A husband and a wife."
Even so they did; and I may say
That to sweet Ruth that happy day
Was more than human life.

Not only is it impossible, we think, for the disinterested lover of poetry to read this either with pleasure or with edification, but it is not easy for him to read it without an ever-broadening smile. As a rule, the verse to be met with in our less fastidious Magazines is not of a very high order. But we doubt if the editor of any one of them would consent to insert the foregoing stanzas, or those that follow, with their, "But as you have before been told," "Meanwhile, as thus with him it fared, They for the voyage were prepared," "God help thee, Ruth! Such pains she had, That she in half a year was mad," and such like specimens of unartistic and naive childishness. Surely, if there be any one who thinks this poetry, it must be Mr. Arnold's friend, the British Philistine? If Murdstone and Quinion could be converted and ever took to reading poetry, would not this be the sort of verse that would delight them? And would they not do so by reason of that "stunted sense of beauty," and that "defective type" of intellect with which Mr. Arnold justly reproaches the English middle-class?

Did these poems stand alone, in their prosaic puerility, we might be surprised that Mr. Arnold had reproduced them; but we should have been content to conclude that, like Homer, both poet and editor had been nodding. But we turn page after page of these "Narrative Poems" to be astonished by what we encounter. The next poem to _Ruth_ is _Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman, with an Incident in which he was Concerned_:

Few months of life has he in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell.
My gentle Reader, I perceive
How patiently you've waited,
And now I fear that you'll expect
Some tale will be related.

O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in everything.
What more I have to say is short,
And you must kindly take it:
It is no tale; but, should you _think_,
Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

Simon is grubbing the stump of a tree, but was unequal to the task. The poet takes the mattock from his hand, and with a blow severs the root, "At which the poor Old Man so long, And vainly had endeavoured." Thankful tears come into his eyes, whereupon the poet remarks:

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.

The sentiment is nice and pretty, but is it poetry, or, even if it were, could it make poetry of the doggerel--for surely there really is no other name for it--that precedes it? And do Wordsworthians against whom Mr. Arnold tells us we ought to be on our guard, or Wordsworthians who fancy that we need not be on our guard against _them_, suppose that moralising correctly and piously in verse about every "incident" in which somebody happens to be "concerned," renders the narrative a "tale,"--much more, makes poetry of it? We are far from saying that Wordsworth might not, in a happier mood, have written poetry upon this particular incident. But we do say, with some confidence, that he has unfortunately not done so; that the incident, narrated in the manner in which he has narrated it, cannot of itself be accepted as poetry--which, as Mr. Arnold well knows, is the extreme Wordsworthian theory, as advocated by Wordsworth himself in pages upon pages of controversial prose; and that we are greatly astonished Mr. Arnold should indirectly lend it countenance, by reprinting and stamping with his precious approval, such infelicitous triviality as the above. We cannot shrink from saying this, through an unworthy dread lest we should be confounded with "the tenth-rate critics and compilers to whom it is still permissible to speak of Wordsworth's poetry, not only with ignorance, but with impertinence." Mr. Arnold has himself shown that he does not hesitate to speak in pretty strong terms of those portions of Wordsworth's verse which he does not regard as poetry. He describes them as "abstract verbiage"; he acknowledges that they are so inferior, it seems wonderful how Wordsworth should have produced them; and in a passage delightfully humorous he imagines a long passage of Wordsworth being declaimed at a Social Science Congress to an admiring audience of men with bald heads and women in spectacles, "and in the soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, mourning, and woe."

All that we ask, therefore, is to be allowed the same amount of liberty which Mr. Arnold himself has exercised, and to be permitted to do what he has done. We, too, would fain disengage what is valuable in Wordsworth's poetry from what is worthless. We, too, would fain "exhibit his best work, and clear away obstructions from around it." But we contend, and we willingly leave the decision to disinterested lovers of poetry, that such poems as _Ruth_ and _Simon Lee_ are not only not Wordsworth's best work, but not good work at all; on the contrary are part of the obstruction from which it should be cleared.

The next two poems in the "Narrative" section refer to the fidelity of dogs, and a single stanza will suffice to show that they are of much the same calibre as the two that precede them:

But hear a wonder for whose sake
This lamentable tale I tell!
A lasting monument of words
This wonder merits well.
The Dog, which still was hovering nigh,
Repeating the same timid cry,
This Dog, had been through three months' space
A dweller in that savage place.

Next in order comes _Hart-Leap Well_, which consists of two parts. In the first we come across such lines and phrases as "Joy sparkled in the prancing courser's eyes," "A rout that made the echoes roar," "Soon did the Knight perform what he had said, And far and wide thereof the fame did ring," "But there is matter for a second rhyme, And I to this would add another tale," which are simply a distress to the disinterested reader of poetry. In the second part, the poet warms up, and ends with a passage which is very beautiful:

Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well;
Small difference lies between thy creed and mine:
This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.

The Pleasure-house is dust:--behind, before,
This is no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, in due course of time, once more
Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.

She leaves these objects to a slow decay,
That what we are, and have been, may be known;
But, at the coming of the milder day,
These monuments shall all be overgrown!

One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals;
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

Of course, this is poetry, and very good poetry; and it is, justly, one of the favourite passages of ardent admirers of Wordsworth. But we can scarcely refrain from saying that, good as it is, there exists something of precisely the same kind, and, as it happens, in precisely the same metre, which is considerably better. Surely, no one will have any difficulty in naming it. It is Gray's famous _Elegy_. Yet we remember how indignant the "Wordsworthians against whom we ought to be on our guard" were with the _Quarterly Review_, because there appeared in it a paper in which Wordsworth and Gray were compared. To mention them in the same breath was sacrilege! We do not wish to affirm that the disinterested lover of poetry believes Gray ever to have scaled the heights where Wordsworth's wing sometimes floats almost without effort. But it cannot be uninteresting to mark that, in what we may call the middle notes, Wordsworth is distinctly inferior to Gray, though ever and anon his voice gets entirely beyond Gray's compass.

It would be impossible, with any regard for space, to quote from, or even to name, every poem reproduced by Mr. Arnold, which in our opinion would have been better suppressed. But if we seem to have established our contention so far, we think the reader may rely upon it that he would more or less concur in what else might be said on this score. _The Force of Prayer_, _The Affliction of Margaret_, _The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman_, are little if any less trivial than the poems already condemned; while in _The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_, we read six pages equally poor and unpoetical, suddenly to come upon such a quatrain as the following:

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

The last two lines it would be impossible to praise too highly. Only the silence of profound reverence can do them justice. They are touches like these, touches like "the harvest of a quiet eye," that give to Wordsworth his holy predominance, and whatever predominance, after fair examination, must be adjudged him. But how few they are! Perhaps it is in the nature of things that they should be so. But being so few and far between, they cannot fill up the blank that intervenes. They are indeed "Angels' visits." But even poetry has to do mainly with human guests, and a poet must be judged, as Mr. Arnold truly affirms, by "the ample body of powerful work" he leaves behind. We cannot assume that much of Wordsworth's poetry is not unutterably bad, because some of it is unutterably beautiful. The utmost we can do is to grant, concerning him, what he himself said so finely of a young girl:

If thou appear'st untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

It is possible that like the "dear child, dear girl," he lay in Abraham's bosom "all the year," but he communicates the fact, he impresses us with the fact, but seldom. As a rule, he seems to be outside the Temple altogether. Hence these magnificent bursts of poetical depth and sublimity, which, be it said, are peculiar to Wordsworth, are mere short passages, and there are not many of them. But if they suffice, after a complete survey of the works of both poets, to place Wordsworth above Byron, we shall be obliged to conclude that they suffice to place him above every poet that ever lived. That such a theory of poetry, such a canon of criticism is untenable, unless we are to cast every hitherto accepted theory of poetry and every former canon of criticism to the winds, we trust, in due course, to be able to establish.

We are aware that _The Brothers_ is a favourite composition with thoroughgoing Wordsworthians. But as we have been told to be on our guard against them, we need not hesitate to say that it seems to us to consist of very ordinary verse, and the piece itself to be devoid of any real poetical temperament, though it fills sixteen pages in Mr. Arnold's collection. Sixteen more are occupied by _Margaret_, upon which we are unable to pronounce a different or a modified verdict. Both abound in such passages as the following:

He left his house: two wretched days had past,
And on the third, as wistfully she raised
Her head from off her pillow, to look forth,
Like one in trouble, for returning light,
Within her chamber-casement she espied
A folded paper, lying as if placed
To meet her waking eyes. This tremblingly
She opened--found no writing, but beheld
Pieces of money carefully enclosed,
Silver and gold. "I shuddered at the sight,"
Said Margaret, "for I knew it was his hand
Which placed it there: and ere that day was ended,
That long and anxious day! I learned from one
Sent hither by my husband to impart
The heavy news,--that he had joined a Troop
Of soldiers, going to a distant land.
He left me thus--he could not gather heart
To take a farewell of me; for he feared
That I should follow with my Babes, and sink
Beneath the misery of that wandering life."

If this be poetry, then poetry is very easily written, and what has hitherto been supposed to be the highest, the most difficult, and the rarest, of the arts, presents no more difficulty to the person who knows how to write at all than the simplest, baldest, and most unartistic prose. What, for instance, is this?--

At length the expected letter from the kinsman came, with kind
assurances that he would do his utmost for the welfare of the boy; to
which requests were added that forthwith he might be sent to him. Ten
times or more the letter was read over. Isabel went forth to show it
to the neighbours round; nor was there at that time on English land a
prouder heart than Luke's. When Isabel had to her house returned, the
old man said, "He shall depart to-morrow." To this word the housewife
answered, talking much of things which, if at such short notice he
should go, would surely be forgotten. But at length she gave consent,
and Michael was at ease.

Is this prose or verse? We have printed it as prose. Wordsworth wrote it as verse, and Mr. Arnold has reproduced it as poetry. Had all Wordsworth's compositions been of this calibre, and a painfully large number of them are, well might John Stuart Mill affirm that any man of good abilities might become as good a poet as Wordsworth by giving his mind to it, and we will add that a man of good abilities could hardly employ them worse. Yet this passage, and fourteen pages of verse not one whit better than it, are to be met with in _Michael_, one of the narrative poems Mr. Arnold, with special emphasis, begs us to admire. "The right sort of verse," he says, "to choose from Wordsworth, if we are to seize his true and most characteristic form of expression, is a line like this from _Michael_:

And never lifted up a single stone.

There is nothing subtle in it, no heightening, no study of poetic style, strictly so called; yet it is expressive of the highest and most expressive kind." Of course, in order to properly appreciate it, we must know the context, which fortunately is easily compressed. Michael and his son Luke were to build a sheepfold; but, as told in the passage we have printed, Luke is sent to a kinsman, who will advance him in life. Before he goes, Michael takes him to lay the first stone of the sheepfold. The lad then leaves home, falls into dissolute courses, and at last hides himself beyond the seas. After that, it is narrated of Michael:

And to that hollow dell from time to time
Did he repair, to build the Fold of which
His flock had need. 'Tis not forgotten yet
The pity which was then in every heart
For the Old Man--and 'tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone.

We have asked several disinterested lovers of poetry, some of them ardent admirers of Wordsworth, what they think of this; and we are bound to say that most of them failed to see anything in it whatsoever. That is not our case. We feel the force of the situation, and the apt simplicity of the concluding line. Yet repeat it, dwell on it, and surrender ourselves to it as we will, we fail to persuade ourselves that it merits the lofty eulogy pronounced on it by Mr. Arnold. It is with hesitation that we presume, on such a point, and where the issue is so direct, to place our opinion in seeming competition with his; but we can only leave the decision to the _communis sensus_ of disinterested lovers of poetry. But nothing--not even Mr. Arnold's authority--could satisfy us that this line suffices to lend the wings of poetry to fourteen closely printed pages of such pedestrian verse as that of which _Michael_ for the most part consists.

The only other poem in the "Narrative" section of the volume is _The Leech-Gatherer_; and it, besides containing many lines of admirable poetry, is itself a coherently beautiful poem. But when, resuming our analysis, we enquire how much poetry there is in the 112 pages, or in more than the third portion of the volume we have as yet examined, what do we find? Exactly 20, and only 20, which we honestly believe the disinterested lover of poetry, the critic to whom Mr. Arnold makes appeal, would recognise as strictly deserving that description. We can seriously assert that this is the amount we should save from the wreck, if we were editing a selection from Wordsworth, were disengaging his good work from his bad, and were seeking to obtain for him readers who care nothing whatever about him personally, and who only wish ever and anon to steep themselves in the atmosphere of native and sterling poetry. We are well aware that, from another and a more extended point of view, Wordsworth never wrote a line, in verse or in prose, which is not worth preserving, and worth reading. But that is not at present the question. We are dealing with the critical contention of a great and influential critic, that "what strikes me with admiration, what establishes in my opinion Wordsworth's superiority"--to Byron, be it understood, and to every English poet since Milton--"is the great and ample body of powerful work which remains to him, even after all his inferior work has been cleared away." This it is which renders it necessary to clear away the inferior work, in order that we may see if the body of "powerful" work that remains be really "ample" or not.

The "Lyrical Poems" contain the best, the most characteristic, and the most valuable of the compositions of Wordsworth. For our part, we should have excluded _To a Sky-Lark_, at page 126--not the beautiful one with the same title at page 142--_Stray Pleasures_, the two poems _At the Grave of Burns_, _Yarrow Visited_, _Yarrow Revisited_, in spite of their vogue with Wordsworthians _quand meme_, _To May_, and _The Primrose of the Rock_. There would then be left 33 pages containing the best poems _of their kind_ anywhere to be found, and of inestimable value to the disinterested lover of poetry. The fervid lover of poetry knows them by heart, and carries them with him through life. Is it necessary to give their names? _She was a Phantom of Delight_, _The Solitary Reaper_, _Three Years She Grew_, _To the Cuckoo_, _I Wandered lonely as a Cloud_--these, and their companions, to be found about the middle of Mr. Arnold's volume, are among the most precious, and will remain among the enduring possessions of mankind. Nor is it only that they fill the mind with elevating thoughts and swell the heart with sacred sentiments. They make one regard, with a peculiar affection, the poet who wrote them. But we must not allow this literary love to warp literary judgment. No such feeling is awakened for their authors by _Childe Harold_ or _Hamlet_. But to conclude that Wordsworth is, therefore, a greater poet than Byron or Shakespeare, would be as illegitimate in the one instance as in the other. It would be to imitate the filial and uxorious fondness of the late Mr. Carlyle, who gravely tells us that his father had a larger intellect than Burns, and that his amiable, long-suffering wife wrote letters of greater value and insight than the works of George Sand and George Eliot, and "all the pack of scribbling women from the beginning of time." To love Wordsworth is pardonable; nay, it is inevitable to those who are intimate with his tenderest work. But the critic must disengage his judgment from his affections, if he is not to mislead the persons he aspires to instruct, and to injure the art of whose dignity he is bound to be jealous.

Briefly, then, and pursuing to the end the "disinterested-lover-of-poetry" method recommended to us by Mr. Arnold, and of which we think we have already given illustrations to enable any one to decide for himself whether we pursue it with equity and candour, we reach the conclusion that, of the 317 pages composing Mr. Arnold's collection, only 103, on a liberal estimate, contain what is worth preserving as poetry; or at least, if there be any dispute as to whether it is poetry, there can be none, outside the specially Wordsworthian circle, as to its being very inferior poetry indeed, and in no degree calculated to confer, extend, or uphold any man's reputation as a poet. That it is admirable in sentiment and laudable in moral purpose, may at once be granted. But the purest of sentiments and the loftiest of purposes do not constitute poetry, even when apparelled in verse. Indeed we may say of them what Mr. Arnold himself says of those portions of Wordsworth's writings which he discards, that they are "doctrine such as we hear in church, religious and philosophical doctrine; and the attached Wordsworthian loves passages of such doctrine, and brings them forward in proof of his poet's excellence. But however true the doctrine may be, it has, as here presented, more of the characters of _poetic_ truth, the kind of truth we require from a poet."

It may possibly seem an ungracious part to dwell upon the inferior portions of Wordsworth work, and to play the _role_ of Devil's Advocate in the case of one who is assured beforehand of the honours of canonisation. But it should be remembered that this invidious task has been imposed upon us by Mr. Arnold, who has asserted, and challenged contradiction to the assertion, that in Wordsworth is to be found "an ampler body of powerful work," which constitutes his superiority over every English poet since Milton. It is he who has rendered it necessary, in justice to other poets, to enquire with accuracy, what _is_ the amount of powerful work to be found in Wordsworth; and this cannot be done without careful and judicial scrutiny. Our object is the same as Mr. Arnold's; not to decry Wordsworth, but to ascertain his proper place in relation to other poets. If we seem to have spoken of him harshly, then so must Mr. Arnold; the only difference between us being that he thinks a certain proportion of Wordsworth's verse poor stuff, while we view a yet larger portion of it in that light. Nor is it the example of Mr. Arnold alone that can be cited in exoneration of perfect outspokenness. M. Scherer is a distinguished French critic, whom Mr. Arnold quotes, and M. Scherer has in turn introduced Mr. Arnold's _Selections_ from Wordsworth to the French public in the pages of the _Temps_. He is a warm admirer of Wordsworth, and, as Mr. Arnold tells us, an excessive depreciator of Byron. From him, therefore, we may, with all the less scruple, cite the following avowals:

The simplicity of Wordsworth's subjects and manner too often
degenerates into triviality, the simplicity of his style into
poverty. He abuses his love for puerile anecdotes, makes us a present
of stories about dogs, and of recitals of what a little girl has said
to her sheep. He not only parades enthusiasm for flowers and birds,
but predilection for beggars, cripples, and idiots. The lower a
person is in the scale of being, the more he strives to awaken our
sympathy in his favour. There are no details so minute, so
insignificant, that he does not take a special pleasure in remarking
them. Is he narrating a walk he takes in summer, he will speak of
"the host of insects gathering round his face, and which are ever
with him as he paces along."

The habit of seeking and finding lessons in the smallest incidents of
his walks becomes a didactic mania. He extracts moralities from every
object, he preaches sermons at every turn. Often, too, this preaching
vein is far from being poetical. One sometimes seems to be listening
to the psalm-singing of a Conventicle. This, for example, resembles a
hymn of Watts.

The poetry of Wordsworth, with the tendency it always had towards the
prosaic, often lapses into it altogether.

This, we submit, is only another way of saying what we have ventured to say, and what Mr. Arnold himself has said. May we not reasonably conclude that M. Scherer would reject at least all that we have rejected? But, in any case, that there is substantial agreement between us and him, so far, is evident.

What, then, is the "ample body of powerful work" that is left of Wordsworth after the eliminating process has been applied to it by the disinterested lover of poetry? Between three and four thousand lines; rather more than the amount of matter in the third and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_, rather less than the amount of matter in _Hamlet_. The quantity therefore, the "body" of work left, is not very large. Still we should not contest that it was "ample" enough to establish the superiority of Wordsworth over Byron, if it happened to be sufficiently "powerful" for the purpose. Though quantity must count for something, even in the comparison of poet with poet, since quantity implies copiousness, and usually implies versatility, quality counts for much more, if the difference in quality be marked, and suffices to abolish the consideration of quantity altogether, if the superiority in respect of quality be sufficiently great. If, for example, the four thousand lines, or thereabouts, of poetry Wordsworth has written, had been embodied, say, in a _Hamlet_, then work so powerful would have been ample to establish his superiority not only over every English poet since Milton, but over every poet since the one who has left us, so to speak, several _Hamlets_.

For what is it that renders _Hamlet_ so great and so powerful? Is it single lines of beautiful poetry? Is it detached passages of profound and elevated thought presented in poetic guise? These go for much, more especially when we consider them in connection with that of which they are the drapery. But what would they be, and what should we think of them, detached from the conception of the drama itself, without the plot, action, and progress of the piece, without the invention and unfolding of its characters, without its varied and forcible situations, without its wit, its irony, its humour? What should we think of _Hamlet_ if divested of the panorama of moving human passions, of its merciless tragedy, and, finally, of its utter absence of moral so complete, that moralists have been for a hundred years wrangling what the moral is? These are the qualities, and these alone, which make great poetry and great poets.

What has Wordsworth of all these? The answer, if candid and disinterested, must be, Absolutely nothing. He has written no epic, no drama, no poem of any kind in which so much as an attempt is made to deal with the clashing of the various passions that "stir this mortal frame." Of Action he is utterly devoid. Of Invention, he seems absolutely unconscious. He has no wit; he has no humour. He has conceived no character, he has portrayed no character. If he can be said to deal with situations at all, they are of the simplest and most elementary kind, and he does not in any sense create them. He finds them at his door. No one blames him for making use of them, where he makes use of them well; but this is a very different thing from the invention shown in _Macbeth_ or _The Tempest_, or even in _Cain_, in _Manfred_, and in _The Siege of Corinth_. Sardanapalus is not a Lear, nor is Myrra a Cordelia. But, as exhibitions and portraitures of human character and human passion in poetry they are as much beyond _Lucy Gray_, or _Michael_, or the little Child in _We are Seven_, as Lear and Cordelia are beyond them in turn.

Upon this point let us again hear M. Scherer:

We must expect from Wordsworth neither the knowledge of the human
heart which worldly experience gives, nor that interior drama of the
passions which a man can describe well only on condition of having
been their victim, nor those general views upon history and society
which are formed partly by study, partly by the practice of public
affairs. Our poet is as much a stranger to the disquietudes of
thought as to those of ambition, to the sufferings of love and of
hate as to that resignation at which one arrives when one has
discerned how very small are the great affairs of this world. He has
nothing of that sublime melancholy, of those fervid questionings, of
those audacious revolts, in which poetry delighted fifty years ago.
Still less has he that mocking scepticism, that raillery now gay now
bitter, which succeeded the songs of despair. He will never be of
those who trouble souls as Byron does, who arm them with irony like
Heine, or who calm them, like Goethe, by the virtue of true
understanding. Wordsworth is simply a Solitary who has long gazed
upon Nature and much analysed his own feelings. Scarcely should we
dare to call him a philosopher, so wanting in him is the reasoning
and speculative element. Even the title of thinker only half becomes
him. He is a contemplative.

It is true that, at the end of his review of Wordsworth, and without any previous admonition that he is going to do so, M. Scherer says, in one brief sentence, "Wordsworth seems to me to come after Milton, notably below him in my opinion, but withal the first after him"; thus endorsing the judgment of Mr. Arnold. But, unlike Mr. Arnold, he makes no attempt to establish or justify this view, but throws it out, as an _obiter dictum_, after writing a long essay, every argument and every phrase of which tend towards a diametrically opposite conclusion. So thoroughly is this the case, that we can honestly say we agree with every word in his essay, with the exception of the one brief sentence we have just cited.

But in the longer and more detailed passage quoted above, is not everything conceded for which we are contending? According to M. Scherer, Wordsworth has knowledge neither of the human heart nor of the interior drama of the passions. He has no broad views of history and society. He is a stranger to love, hatred, ambition, and the disquietudes they cause, as well as to the disquietudes caused by deep thought; and not having passed through these, he has necessarily not "come out upon the other side," and is equally a stranger to the tranquillity of complete knowledge and complete experience. He is not a philosopher; he is hardly a thinker. He is a contemplative solitary, who has consorted much with woods, lakes, and mountains, and has dwelt much upon the sensations they excite in himself. Verily, this is a sorry equipment for a great poet. Is it an exaggeration to say that, if all this be true, Wordsworth is destitute of most of the qualities which in a great poet have hitherto been deemed indispensable? If, in spite of these remarkable deficiencies, he really be the greatest English poet since Milton, we shall be forced to conclude that English poets since Milton have been far less powerful, of far lower calibre, and of far less value, than has generally been supposed.

What then is the precise value, the real calibre, the particular kind of power, of that "ampler body of powerful work" which Wordsworth has given us? We have seen it is not an epic, nor a drama, nor one great comprehensive poem of any kind. It consists of lyrics, ballads, sonnets, and odes; of many of which it would not be just or critical to say more than that they are very sweet and charming, several of which must be pronounced exquisite, and a few, very few, of which may be designated sublime. We own we share the general opinion that the greatest composition of Wordsworth is the _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_. We are surprised and disappointed to find Mr. Arnold speaking rather coldly of it; and M. Scherer likewise refers to it in a depreciatory tone, though he gives different reasons for his conclusion. M. Scherer thinks it "sounds a little false," and adds that he "cannot help seeing in it a theme adopted with reference to the poetic developments of which Wordsworth was susceptible, rather than a very serious belief of the author." We confess we think the judgment harsh, and the reasons given for it insufficient, if not indeed irrelevant. The objection Mr. Arnold entertains for it is that "it has not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her beauty had no doubt extraordinary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die away afterwards, is to say what is extremely doubtful."

Now, with all deference to Mr. Arnold, which is due to him in a special manner when he is expounding Wordsworth, Wordsworth does not say this. In the first place, Wordsworth, after describing the comparative and temporary diminution of this instinct, describes its revival and transfiguration in another guise. But what is far more important to note is, Wordsworth does _not_ say the instinct is universal. He is writing as a poet, not as a psychologist; and though he treats of an objective infant for a time, and uses the pronoun "_our_ infancy," he in reality is describing his own experience, and letting it take its chance of being the experience of a certain number of other people. What, we may well ask, can a poet do more than this, when he gets into the higher range, the upper atmosphere of poetry? When Shakespeare talks of "the shade of melancholy boughs," he does not mean that everybody feels them to be melancholy. That is the privilege--the melancholy privilege, if any one wills it so--of the higher natures. That what Wordsworth describes in his splendid _Ode_ not only was true of himself, but is true likewise of all great poetic spirits, we entertain no doubt; and it will become true of an ever-increasing number of persons, if mankind is to make progress in the intimate and integral union of intellectual and poetic sentiment. In our opinion, the highest note of Wordsworth is struck in this Ode, and maintained through a composition of considerable length and of argumentative unity of purpose. It is struck by him elsewhere--indeed in the lines on Hartley Coleridge, we have a distinct overture, so to speak, to the Ode; but nowhere is it sustained for so long, or with such oneness, definiteness, and largeness of aim. There is, perhaps, no finer poem, of equal length, in any language. We could well understand any one maintaining that there exists no other so fine.

But, if this Ode be struck out of the account, what remains to represent an "ample body of powerful work"? For, after all, in criticism, if we criticise at all, we must use words with some definite meaning. Perhaps Mr. Arnold would tell us that it is not the business of true Culture to be too definite; and we should heartily agree with him. One of the things that makes prose so inferior to poetry is its inaccurate precision. But it is Mr. Arnold himself who, on this occasion, compels us to be precise. He has elected to compare Wordsworth with every poet since Milton, and, in doing so, he has been obliged to use language which, to be of any use, must be more or less definite. What is meant by "ample"? Still more, what is meant by "powerful"? Does he mean that Wordsworth's "Lyrical Poems," which we think to be the best of Wordsworth's compositions after the Ode, and which he thinks the best, before the Ode, are "powerful"? Let us quote perhaps the best of them, already quoted elsewhere, but that can never be read too often:

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
So sweetly to reposing bands
Of Travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened till I had my fill,
And when I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

This is exquisite; and of the sort of exquisiteness that leads one, in private, and in uncritical colloquies, to fall, as the phrase runs, into ecstasies. But can it, with any regard to accuracy of speech, be described as "powerful" work? We submit that it cannot. _Lear_ is powerful. The first six books of _Paradise Lost_ are powerful. The first four cantos of _Don Juan_ are powerful. The _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_ is powerful. But unless we are to lose ourselves in a labyrinth of critical confusion, we must no more allege or allow that _The Solitary Reaper_ is powerful, than we can affirm that _Where the Bee Sucks_ is powerful, that Milton's sonnet, _To the Nightingale_ is powerful, or that Byron's _She Walks in Beauty like the Night_ is powerful. They are all very beautiful; but that is another matter, and it will not do to confound totally different things.

How many lyrics, as perfect as the one we have quoted, has Wordsworth written? We can count but nine; and the most liberal computation could not extend them beyond twelve. To these would have to be added perhaps twice as many, very inferior to these, but still very beautiful, a certain number, but a very limited number, of first-rate sonnets, the Odes we have referred to, and detached lines and passages from other poems, notably the passage in the poem _On Revisiting Tintern Abbey_. The result would be about a third of the amount we ourselves should altogether extract from Wordsworth, and of which alone it could justly be said that some of it was powerful, and all of it was very beautiful work.

This is what, we venture to assert, remains, after rigid scrutiny, of "the ampler body of powerful work" which Wordsworth has given us. These are the compositions which, according to Mr. Arnold, "in real poetical achievement ... in power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring freshness," establish Wordsworth's superiority.

Now can this claim possibly be allowed, unless, as we have said, all previous canons of criticism, and all previous estimates of poetry are to be cast to the winds? If it is to be allowed, then AEschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, must come down from their pedestals, and be regarded by us with very different eyes from those with which we have hitherto scanned them. For what are the marks, what the qualities, which have distinguished these poets above their fellows, and by reason of which the world has extolled their genius? It is not merely for poetic diction, for tenderness of sentiment, for elevation of feeling, for apt simile, appropriate metaphor, illuminating imagery, and the play of fancy as exhibited in subordinate detail, that we estimate them as we do. Neither is it, as we have already pointed out, but as we must repeat, for detached passages of sublimity, nor yet for short poems of exquisite beauty, that they have been assigned the rank they occupy. They occupy that rank by reason of their great conceptions, by reason of their capacity to project long and comparatively complex poems dedicated to a lofty theme, and to conduct these through all their intricate windings from first to last, by employing all the arts, all the expedients, all the resources of Imagination, chief among which are Action, Invention, and Situation. To these, of course, must be added copious, elastic, and dignified language, melody, pathos, and just imagery; for, without these, a man is not a poet at all. These are the very instruments of his craft, the very credentials of his profession; and if he has these, no one will challenge his right to be called a poet. But, unless the higher qualities, the greater credentials are also his, he must be content with an inferior place, no matter how many beautiful or sublime things he may have said, and no matter how excellent the doctrines he may have taught. He has failed to show his mastery over the great materials, his familiarity with the great purposes, of his art. Wordsworth projected two long poems, _The Prelude_ and _The Excursion_; and, practically, these two are one. They are of portentous length; and that is their only claim to be considered great. They have no Action, no Situation, no Invention, no Characters. They consist of pages upon pages, nay, of books upon books, of interminable talk, in which in reality Wordsworth himself is the only talker. Little of the talk is poetry. Much of it is, as Mr. Arnold says, "abstract verbiage." But we need not pursue the theme. Mr. Arnold candidly confesses that when Jeffrey said of _The Excursion_, "this will never do," he was quite right.

Unquestionably, he was right; and he would still have been right, even had _The Excursion_ contained a far greater number of passages of true poetry than it does. It will be an evil day for poetry, and for the readers of poetry, if it ever comes to be allowed that the sole or the main function of poetry is to _talk about_ things, and that a man can get himself accepted as a great poet by pursuing this course. Unfortunately, it was Wordsworth's theory that he could. It would be fatal if critics became of the same opinion. It is their bounden duty, on the contrary, to protest against such a theory. Wordsworth sets it down, in black and white, both in prose and verse, over and over again:

O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you will find
A tale in everything.
What more I have to say is short,
And you must kindly take it:
It is no tale; but, should you think,
Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

Here is the theory full-blown. The poet is not to tell the tale, the reader is to make it one, by thinking; and if he only thinks enough, he will find a tale in everything! Could anything be more grotesque, or more utterly opposed to any sane canon of the function of an author, and his relation to his readers? It is the business of the poet to tell the tale, and thereby to set the reader thinking; an altogether different process from the one here suggested. "Wordsworthians against whom we must be upon our guard," often cite the following stanza with admiration:

The moving accident is not my trade;
To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts!

Have they forgotten the "moving accidents by flood and field," or do they not know whose trade it was to unfold a tale that

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood?